Insight

Gaming + Fitness

Gaming and Fitness is a growing market ripe for new developers to build experiences for people to start and maintain a movement habit.

If we look at the gaming space, this is an exploding adoption. It's projected $200 billion today, with a projected $321 billion in 2026. The number of people who play games is estimated around 2.77 billion people, with 60% males, and 40% females. These numbers are projected to continue growing as more games are developed and used in a variety of ways.

When applying games to fitness, you lower the rate of perceived exertion (RPE), which provides users ability to workout without experiencing the pain during their workout. Once the workout is complete, you get the hit of dopamine which you are so thankful for having going through that pain.

In sports, RPE exists through the constant moves and feedback loops that are driven by the game's design of that sport.

In Zwift (cycling game using your bike and mobile phone), you are projected into a virtual world with constant feedback loops to let you know you are doing it right, while pushing you toward goals. While in virtual reality, several games exist to help you box, or jump up and down that replicates a workout, but you are experiencing it through a game.

Nintendo's Ring Fit adventure uses a hardware device to track movements with resistance, while you play a role playing game that lowers RPE.

Other examples of gaming + fitness is boxing in virtual reality and Dance Dance Revolution. Once augmented reality becomes more mainstream, the immersion of games and fitness will blend even further.

This is not the gamification of fitness, rather the early stages of using the heart of what makes a game fun, and then applying physical movement.

In 2020, fitness games drove $35 billion, up 2 percent from 2018.

Game development is becoming easier. Unity and Unreal provides frameworks and templates to spin up a game in days, rather than months. Online tools like RPGMaker let you build RPG games with fully fleshed game mechanics. Ai tools like Stable Diffusion and Dalle-2 let you create visual assets from text prompts. The tools are available and becoming more powerful and accessible, which will lead to developers building more games, which then leads to an actual understanding of what makes a good game (again, this is not gamifying a utility app), and then creating games that engage players and have them coming back.

We will begin to see an explosion of new games in typical fashion like World of Warcraft, but we will also start to see games that look much different than what we see today. For example, financial apps like Robinhood will become more game like, and use principals to teach people to become better traders. Duolingo teaches people new languages, where their product designers are inspired by the video games they are playing currently. These experiences will continue adopting game techniques to take advantage of what games offer: fun.

Sports awareness

3 out of 4 kids have played sports in their youth, but only 1 out of 4 adults play a sport. The skill and feeling of a sport is familiar to almost everyone, but very inaccessible to adults. Sports is an engaging activity that touches on skill building, testing yourself, community and camaraderie, and many other senses that release dopamine to want a player to come back and engage again.

How might we leverage the sports experience and its components to engage people in building healthy habits?